


Five & Dime

by Greensilver (Trelkez)



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-23
Updated: 2008-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-02 17:51:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trelkez/pseuds/Greensilver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If not for the Bartlet for America signs plastered all over the windows, Sam would've walked right by the campaign office. (Pre-series.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five & Dime

If not for the _Bartlet for America_ signs plastered all over the windows, Sam would've walked right by the campaign office. The windows were wrapped with Christmas lights that grew brighter by the second as the sun set behind him, and old store signage still adorned the exterior; the speckled remnants of a carefully hand-lettered -- _&amp; Dime_ were visible on the brick above the door, half-covered by snow-dusted bunting.

_A good place to start_, Josh had said. _Kind of homey_, he'd said. He'd omitted the part where they would literally be running a nickel and dime operation.

"Polonius said that brevity was the soul of wit," Sam informed the _&amp; Dime_ sign, squinting to keep falling snow out of his eyes. "I'm starting to come down on the side of irony, myself."

"Oh, me, too," said a tall, pinch-mouthed redhead as she brushed past him and shoved open the front door. "It's like that song, you know the one? 'Isn't it ironic, don't you--'"

"Actually, I don't," he interrupted, following her into the campaign office. "Think, that is. That it's ironic, I mean. Which is to say, the song in question - I--" He tried to stick out a hand, and nearly dropped his suitcase. "I'm Sam Seaborn."

"Oh!" Her friendly, gossipy air instantly turned stiff and disapproving. Maybe his reputation preceded him - if so, no doubt thanks to Josh. "Leo wasn't expecting you until tomorrow. He's not in right now."

"I'm sorry," he said, half-guessing; she nodded, clearly accepting his apology. "Can you tell me where--"

"Sorry," she said, and took off, honing in on a hapless-looking desk-dweller. Probably a volunteer; he doubted the campaign could afford to pay everyone squeezed into the place.

On the inside, the office wasn't terrible, just generic. It looked pretty much like any campaign headquarters might look at any given point in time: desks haphazardly scattered around a nondescript office space with poster-cluttered windows and piles of bunting stuffed into the corners. Sleep-deprived, hyper-caffeinated people were packed into every available square inch of space, and the allocation of that space was roughly equal; there weren't any signs of a hierarchy, or for that matter, order of any kind.

Josh had promised Sam in New York that he'd have an office, but the way things looked, Sam wasn't sure he'd even have a _desk_.

"Hi," he said, accosting a girl too young to be anything but an intern. "I'm Sam Seaborn."

"Leo wasn't expecting you until tomorrow," she said, casting a furtive look in the direction the redhead had gone.

"I know, and I promise I'll never be better than punctual again - if you can just point me to Josh Lyman's office." He paused. "That is, if Josh Lyman_ has_ an office."

"Mr. Lyman? Yes, he does." She pointed to a door at the back of the room. "It's that way."

"Thank you," he said, hefting his suitcase. "What's your name?"

"Sally?" She sounded unsure, and he had to wonder what sort of campaign this was, if the interns were forgetting their own names.

Sam gave Sally a smile, and retreated for the relative safety of the door in the far wall.

In a fairly predictable turn of events given Sam's luck thus far, Josh's office proved to be empty. Sam backtracked down the hallway and stood in the doorway with his suitcase in one hand and his briefcase in the other, surveying the chaos, trying to pick out Josh or Leo McGarry. He didn't recognize anyone. There weren't as many people on hand as he'd initially thought there were, and the main office wasn't as large as it had looked from the front door; the two were probably directly related. Better to have the appearance of a crowd in a small space than vast swaths of empty chairs in a large space, after all.

He was stalling. He had to ask someone where to go, or what to do; he couldn't just gawk from the relative safety of the doorway forever. He wasn't going to get paid for doing _that_, and he was definitely going to need to get paid sooner or later - his savings were only going to float him so far, particularly with Lisa digging into them every day for _wedding this_ or _wedding that_.

He had to ask someone.

There was a balding man with a foul expression in the middle of the main office, his fingers slightly flexed around a tangerine the way a pitcher might grasp a baseball. He looked like he was about to chuck that tangerine at someone's head, but he wasn't focused on any one person or set target; he was just watching the campaign staff as a whole, his gaze drifting from one end of the room to the other. His mood and seeming inertia probably marked him as Toby Ziegler, which meant there was at least one senior staff member on premises whom Sam could speak with, given a lack of viable alternatives.

He took a half-step back, and peered down the row of closet-sized offices. Empty, all of them.

Fine. He was man enough to face one grumpy bald guy.

Sam left his belongings in Josh's office, securely stashed behind Josh's mess of a desk, and approached Toby from his one o'clock. He wasn't trying to be stealthy, per se, but the less time Toby had to glare at him, the better.

"Hi," he said, addressing the back of Toby's head. "I'm--"

"I know," Toby interrupted, not turning around. "What do you want?"

"An office," Sam said. That wasn't quite what he'd meant to say, but it was close enough. "I'm told I have one, so I'd like to be directed to it."

"To your office."

"Yes. Well -- yes."

"Uh-huh." Toby rubbed a hand over his head, tangerine and all. "First campaign?"

A blonde woman at a nearby desk looked up, obviously having overheard, and gave Sam a tiny smile that reeked of assumed solidarity. He smiled back on reflex, and it took a moment for the meaning of that smile to process.

They thought he was a volunteer.

"Oh," he said, his ears going hot. "I'm not--"

"I'm sure. Grab a phone, whatever, I don't care. " Toby waved a hand, clearly intending the conversation to be over.

Sam circled the desk Toby was perched on, trying to get into his line of sight. "You don't understand. I'm not an intern, or a volunteer, or - I didn't even volunteer to come out here, I was - kind of roped into it, but Josh can be persuasive--"

Toby's eyebrows lifted a little. "Josh Lyman can be persuasive?"

"Sometimes," Sam said, almost smiling. "He gave me this whole speech about cows - or maybe it was dairy--"

"It was dairy." Toby's expression shifted a little, to just this side of recognition; he did know who Sam was. "The EDS, in Nashua."

"Right." Sam offered Toby a hand. "Sam Seaborn."

Toby only hesitated for a second before he gave Sam's hand a light, perfunctory clasp. "Toby--"

"I know," Sam interrupted, unable to resist the opening. Toby looked faintly amused, but not all that abashed; all things considered, that look was probably as close to an apology as Sam was going to get. "About my office--"

Toby slid off the desk, impatiently waving for Sam to follow along in his wake. "Over here."

Sam followed Toby into an office about the size of a refrigerator, already stacked high with books and papers. An ancient-looking computer was churning along on the desk, and the monitor displayed a half-written document.

"This isn't my office," Sam said, in case the obvious wasn't as obvious as he thought it was.

"No, it's mine." Toby grabbed a slightly crumpled sheet of paper off the desk and stuck it in Sam's hands, waving at him again. "Third paragraph. Hurry up."

Sam scanned down the page, trying to figure out what the hell it was he was reading. It was a speech; in fact, it was the stump speech, almost word for word, right up until the third paragraph - at which point it went completely off the rails, crashing headfirst into Social Security. The all-or-nothing feel of the text was vintage Bartlet; Sam had been studying up on Bartlet's oratory to date, and the straightforwardness and urgency of the language wasn't unfamiliar. The content, however, was a little brow-raising, and the edited sections of the speech had clearly been written in haste - there was a typo in the second sentence, and the paragraph ended with a dangling modifier.

Sam snapped the page taut between his hands to smooth out some of its creases. "You're going to pitch this to Bartlet?"

"To Leo," Toby said, folding his arms. "What do you think?"

"I think," Sam started, and then paused, shaking his head. "Why are you asking me what I think?"

Toby shrugged. "I've read your stuff. What do you think?"

"You've read my _stuff_?" Sam immediately tossed up a hand in a defensive gesture, warding off Toby's quickfire switch from curiosity to irritation. "Never mind. I think that you absolutely do not pitch this to Bartlet--"

"Leo," Toby interrupted.

"Or Leo," Sam amended. "Not right now. He's not going after Social Security right now, not in the primaries, not when he's starting to gain ground in the polls--"

"I'm sorry," Toby said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "I didn't know we were supposed to leave the issues to the guys who are safely out of the running. Was there a memo?"

"That's not what I meant," Sam said, trying not to let Toby steamroll right over him. "After the primaries--"

"You sound just like Leo," Toby said, scornfully, like that was a bad thing.

"After we've got the nomination," Sam pushed on. "We focus on getting the nomination _first_, and we tackle Social Security later, when it counts."

"It always counts. There is _no_ time at which the moral high ground doesn't _count._"

"I didn't know Social Security was our moral high ground," Sam shot back, making a broad, frustrated gesture. "This campaign hasn't exactly been about--"

Toby looked like he'd finally found a target for his tangerine. "How would you know what this campaign has been about?"

The last of Sam's patience evaporated. "We don't go up against Hoynes on Social Security!"

Toby was just about bellowing now; the man had some serious lung capacity. "Why the hell not?"

"Because we'll _lose!_" Sam shouted, slamming the rewritten speech down on Toby's desk.

"Uh," Josh said, from the doorway.

Sam and Toby rounded on him as one.

"Josh!"

"Leo actually let you hire this guy?"

"Yeah, I--" Josh jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Incoming."

"Gentlemen!" Leo McGarry elbowed past Josh to give Toby a measuring look, one Sam pressed back against a filing cabinet to escape. "Toby, what are you thinking? Social Security?"

_Now _Toby looked abashed. "Leo--"

"Whatever," Leo said, turning his back on all three of them. "We'll talk later." He got a few steps away from Toby's office before he turned around, raised his eyebrows at Sam, and said, "Are you coming?"

Sam was starting to think that if he _did _have an office, he was never going to see it; he was just going to spend the entire campaign following impatient political operatives around to _their _offices, and his belongings were going to stay under Josh's desk until November.

Leo stopped in front of an unlit office, ripped a sign that said_ Cal Mathis_ off the window, and gave Sam a look that made him feel like a disobedient toddler.

"Here's your office," Leo said, crumpling up the last guy's sign and tossing it to Sam. "The governor requested revisions to the stump speech, but I can guarantee you he didn't have Social Security in mind, so I suggest you temporarily forgo any more bickering with Toby Ziegler in the name of getting those edits done _before_ the governor returns from Danbury this afternoon."

"This afternoon," Sam repeated, unable to keep a tiny note of disbelief out of his voice. "Mr. Secretary, it's _already_ afternoon--"

"Call me Leo," he said, and patted Sam on the arm. "Get moving."


End file.
